There had not been many others, but I didn’t think I was missing much. Most of the time I was too busy to notice. I would have liked kids, one day, but I would only create a child with someone I really cared about, and to this date the only person I had ever even imagined falling in love with was Connor.
“I have to go,” I said. “This is costing a fortune.”
“Call me Thursday after you meet him.”
“Ophelia—”
“Thursday.”
I closed my eyes. “We’ll see,” I said. “No promises.”
I HAD NEVER SEEN SO MANY PEOPLE WHO WERE PAID TO DO NOTHING.
People sat on the ground, on folding canvas chairs, on boulders. There were cranes set up with tremendous cameras, and wires leading everywhere. A man wearing headphones sat in front of a portable sound system colored with knobs and levers. Everyone was talking, George and Edward were nowhere to be found, and no one seemed to be in charge.
I was used to being sent to desolate locations without knowing a soul, but here I was out of my element. It seemed everywhere I placed my foot I got it tangled in some cord, and I had run right into a man carrying a profusion of wigs and tweed caps, knocking him to the ground. “Oh my God,” I said, “let me help you.” But he had just given me a dirty look, gathered his things, and rushed away.
I walked up to a woman who sat on a high canvas chair labeledSCRIPT. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for the director.”
She sighed, but she didn’t look up from the open loose-leaf binder she held in her lap. “You and me both, babe,” she said. She scribbled a note with a red pencil, and then yelled out someone’s name, waving him over with her hand.
I bobbed and weaved past people with walkie-talkies looped into their belts. Lying across a table was a pile of scripts. ” ‘In His Image,’ ”
I read aloud, running my fingers over the Warner Brothers insignia at the bottom.
“Can I help you?” A harried-looking man stood in front of me, tapping his foot. He snatched the script out of my hand.
“I’m looking for Bernie Roth,” I said. “The director.”
The man sneered at me. “Like I don’t know who he is?” He snapped his fingers as two brawny men walked by carrying a heavy black rope.
“Hey—hey, where are you going with that? I told you it was supposed to gobehindthe tent.”
“Wait,” I said as he scurried after the rope, “Bernie Roth?”
“In a minute,” he stalled. He yelled after the two men carrying the rope. “Behindthe tent!”
I slung my knapsack onto the table and pulled a khaki baseball cap onto my head. If Mohammed can’t get to the mountain, I figured, I’d just wait for the mountain to come to Mohammed. Sooner or later, someone was going to try to locate me. I sat down with my back against a tall tree, and hugged my knees to my chest.
I tried to think about Alex Rivers. I knew what he looked like, of course—he was on the cover of a magazine every month, or so it seemed.
He was, in a word, stunning. His brown hair was shot with gold; his jaw was square and marked by the cleft of his chin. He had a full, generous mouth that always looked as if he was holding back a secret.
And his eyes, his claim to fame, were remarkable. They were the splitsilver of an empty mirror, and like a mirror, when you looked into them even in a publicity photo, you could swear you were seeing your soul.
I supposed it wouldn’t be a hardship to face him every day.
I was surprised at the quiet. No cameras were rolling, no one was waving frantically and calling “Action,” no one was even saying anything that resembled a line. A fine red dust covered all the photographic equipment, as if it hadn’t been used recently at all. No wonder it took twelve weeks to make a two-hour film.
The set, from what I could see, was in three parts. The first section was the actual excavation site of Olduvai Gorge, looking not much different from theUCLAsite a half-mile away. The second area was a series of tents, and in front of one of them was an actress I had seen before but couldn’t name. She was wearing khaki shorts and a Kalahari bush jacket, and I decided that my first piece of technical advice would be to tell the costume designer that theNational Geographiclook was nowhere near as realistic as a comfortable old T-shirt.
The third set was on a raised platform, designed to look like the inside of a tent. There was a cot and a collection of artfully arranged empty cartons, a low trestle table. On a shelf was a patterned china bowl and pitcher, and I couldn’t help laughing out loud. China?
After a few minutes a girl came to sit beside me. “Shit, it’s hot,” she said. She smiled, the first real smile I’d seen since I arrived. “Who are you here with?”
“Just me,” I said, taken aback by the question, as if I were supposed to bring a date. “I’m the technical advisor on anthropology.”
“Wow,” the girl breathed. “You mean you do this for aliving?”
